… We are a generation that wants everything, and wants it NOW! We may have speed dating but not speed social transformations and political revolutions.

Today’s occupations are not the first either. The Democrats I referenced before looked to an earlier moment in our own revolution’s history: #OccupyValleyForge. True, that was a war, not a movement, but its methods deserve scrutiny.

As I have just learned, “they brought in what were known as Regimental Camp Followers, women and children, basically, relatives and families of enlisted men. They built structures, erected defenses, and two more things. They worked out an alliance with France, and they basically made the Continental Army out of their troops at Valley Forge. They did this with the help of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who had been, dare I say, a community organizer type for the Prussian military… community.

The Continental Army was built through shared hardship and struggle, with excruciating drilling and training, and they were provided with ample moral support in the form of the Regimental Camp Followers..”

History never repeats itself. The bearded oracle once said that when it does, the second time is farce.

We have to prepare for the possibility that Occupied Wall Street will take new forms, and may have to spread out and decentralize as it already happening with meetings in public atriums and church yards. It has already outgrown one park and spread through the world. It has, to its credit, brought issues like economic inequality and Wall Street crime into the national conversation. It has so far succeeded beyond its greatest hopes.

It is revolutionary in its very leaderless small “d” democratic being but has not yet made a revolution. No surprise there! There is quite a way to go.

The battle with the oligarchy as symbolized by the greedsters and fraudsters on Wall Street will go on, with or without a Park, as a form of non-violent guerilla style class warfare, always bearing in mind, that moral power can defeat physical power when it is creative, courageous, non-violent and committed for the long run. (full text).